sonsbeek20—24
Force Times Distance
On Labour and its Sonic Ecologies
12th edition 05.06.2020 - 13.09.2020
artistic director:
Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung
general director:
Steven van Teeseling
co-curators:
Antonia Alampi, Amal Alhaag, Zippora Elders, Aude Christel Mbga, Vincent van Velsen
Since its first edition in 1949, sonsbeek, a path-breaking exhibition for art in the public space, has contributed to and redefined international contemporary art and the discourse surrounding it. The art exhibition, taking place in the public space and several institutions of Arnhem (The Netherlands) is one of the earliest large-scale art projects, following the Venice Biennale (1895), Whitney Biennial (1932), and preceeding documenta (1955).
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New viable format: double edition sonsbeek20—24
The 12th edition of the sonsbeek quadrennial, which will run from June 5 to September 13, 2020 and onwards to 2024, takes place under the auspices of artistic director Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung and his team of co-curators Antonia Alampi, Amal Alhaag, Zippora Elders, Aude Christel Mbga, and Vincent van Velsen. Overseen by the new general director Steven van Teeseling, the sonsbeek foundation will explore the elasticity of the large-scale temporary art event format and connected conditions of artistic labor.
In terms of exhibition making, sonsbeek aims to decelerate the traditional artistic practice surrounding large-scale art exhibitions, in order to achieve a long-term reciprocal relation between and dedication to artists, institutions, place and audiences. In an age of extreme acceleration and ephemeral interactions, shifting the format in which these sizable art events take place is all too relevant. Through the new sonsbeek format, Ndikung, together with his curatorial team and contributors, will delve deeper into working conditions that are geared towards not just one event—as is usually the case—but towards an ongoing engagement for five years.
In this new, more sustainable form, sonsbeek will abandon the usual rhythm of contemporary art production and exhibition, and instead stretch out in a continued public process until 2024, thereby consolidating and encapsulating two editions. This format will, first and foremost, create room for the invited artists and collaborators, but also for the curatorial and production teams to deepen their research, offering the possibility of engaging with the local scenes and communities in a more profound way. A prolonged, elastic, expanded notion of a time-based art project.
This means that sonsbeek20—24 will become a platform in which various activities like exhibitions, discursive programs, residencies, publishing, radio and more can emerge throughout its time-frame, by engaging audiences and contributors in a shared journey with the institutions, the city and its social texture. This process of ripening, development and fermentation, deepens the way in which artists can respond to the curatorial framework and the local context.
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Curatorial Concept: Force Times Distance – On Labour and its Sonic Ecologies
The curatorial concept for the upcoming edition of sonsbeek, titled Force Times Distance – On Labour and its Sonic Ecologies—much like its new structure—revolves around the issue of labour, its conditions and rights in relation to varying times and geo-cultural spaces. This project has its crux in the socioeconomic relationship between employers and employees. It will look into the ways history of labour and the working class reflects and is framed by issues like race, gender, class structure, geographical distance and politics.
These issues will be explored through their sonicity: the exhibition will act as a choreography of sonic movements. It will engage with an expanded and augmented musicality that invites and encourages different modes of listening, which want to make audible that which has always been present, but never heard/listened to—and render visible that which has somehow remained unseen. An exhibition that uncovers and recovers, restitutes and repairs the ever segregating conditions under which we live, between visible and invisible bodies, labour and lands. Gathering around the works by artists who work sculpturally, performatively and sonically, the project will also investigate the sculptural dimension of the laborious, sonic, as well as the politics of the sonorous—multi-medially and multidisciplinary.
The exhibition will take the form of a complex and historically laden parcours through an aircraft hangar, (former) estates, farm structures, bunkers and art spaces (Museum Arnhem, Kröller Müller Museum and private foundation Collectie de Groen), as well as the sonsbeek park. The labour of the countless people that have been engaged in the building and maintaining of these structures, who sweated in the tilling of the soils and the cultivation of the lands; the cooks, cleaners, care-takers, gardeners, concierges, builders, factory workers, soldiers, nurses, and many more.
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Team
sonsbeek20—24 is conceived by artistic director Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung. Ndikung is acurator, author and biotechnologist. He is the founder and artistic director of SAVVY Contemporary Berlin. He was curator-at-large for documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel and guest curator of the 2018 Dak’Art Biennale in Senegal, together with the Miracle Workers Collective, he curated the Finland Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2019. He is currently the artistic director of the 12th Bamako Encounters - African Biennale of Photography 2019.
Antonia Alampi is a curator, art-historian and writer based in Berlin where she is Artistic Co-Director of SAVVY Contemporary (2016-). In addition to curating independently, she was curator of Beirut in Cairo (2012-2015), and of Extra-City Kunsthal in Antwerp (2017-2019). She is the co-founder of the curatorial and research platform Future Climates, and more recently of Toxic Commons.
Amal Alhaag is an Amsterdam-based independent curator, dj and researcher who develops ongoing experimental and collaborative research practice, public programs and projects on global spatial politics, archives, colonialism, counter-culture, oral histories and popular culture. Her projects and collaborations with people, initiatives and institutions invite, stage, question and play with "uncomfortable" issues that riddle, rewrite, remix, share and compose narratives in impermanent settings.
Zippora Elders is based between The Netherlands and Berlin. She is the Artistic Director of Kunstfort bij Vijfhuizen, Island for Art and Heritage in The Netherlands (2016-). Previously she was a curator at Foam (2014-16) and a curator-in-training at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (2013-14). Her background is in art history and theory, heritage and museology, and curatorial studies. She is an external curator at Art Rotterdam, Buitenplaats Doornburgh and Fondation Constant and holds several advisory positions.
Aude Christel Mbga is an independent curator based between Cameroon and the Netherlands. She was a participant of the De Appel 2018/19 curatorial Programme . In 2017, Aude worked as an assistant curator next to Cécile Bourne-Farrell for the SUD2017, an international triennial of art in the public space, organized by doual'art, a center for contemporary art, for the city of Douala. She is a member of the Madrassa Collective.
Vincent van Velsen is an Amsterdam-based writer and curator with a background in business administration, art and architectural history. He holds the position of contributing editor at Dutch contemporary art magazine Metropolis M. Van Velsen is a resident at the Van Eyck Academy and guest resident at the Rijksakademie. He is part of the Amsterdam Municipal Curatorial Advisory Group (Stadscuratorium) and a member of the board at De Appel.
The new model of sonsbeek20—24 will be overseen by Steven van Teeseling, the newly appointed general director.
sonsbeek20—24 will commence on June 5, 2020 and run for four years after that. During this period, the working format will result in a large-scale ongoing exhibition, complete with a public and educational program, a newly launched sonsbeek archive, and an ongoing series of publications, comics and a radio station.

**21 Feb – 25 Ott 2020**
Martin Kippenberger, Orson Welles, Tangerine Dream
K
February 21–July 27, 2020
Fondazione Prada presents the exhibition K that features Martin Kippenberger’s legendary artwork The Happy End of Franz Kafka’s “Amerika”, accompanied by Orson Welles’ iconic film The Trial and Tangerine Dream’s late electronic album The Castle. Conceived by Udo Kittelmann as a coexisting trilogy, K is inspired by three uncompleted and seminal novels by Franz Kafka (1883-1924) "Amerika (America), Der Prozess (The Trial), and Das Schloss (The Castle)" posthumously published from 1925 and 1927. The unfinished nature of these books allows multiple and open readings and their adaptation into an exhibition project, that explored the novels’ subjects and atmospheres through allusions and interpretations.
At the heart of K lies Martin Kippenberger’s installation The Happy End of Franz Kafka’s “Amerika” (1994), on view at the ground floor of Podium and never exhibited in Italy before.
Based on the novel America published in 1927, the work re-imagines a section of the book when the protagonist Karl Rossmann, having travelled across America, applies for a job at the “biggest theatre in the world.” German artist Martin Kippenberger (1953-1997) explored the fictional utopia of universal employment, adapting Kafka’s idea of communal job interviews into an extensive artwork. The installation gathers a vaste array of objects and furniture, such as several tables and vintage design or flea market chairs and elements from previous Kippenberger’s exhibitions, in order to stage a soccer field for conducting mass interviews.
The second element of the trilogy is Orson Welles’ film The Trial (1962) based on Kafka’s book of the same title and to be screened at Fondazione Prada’s Cinema. Orson Welles (1915-1985) wrote and realized a dream-logic black comedy drama movie, considered by the critics as one of his masterpieces for its scenic design and cinematography. The combination of Kafka and Welles was defined by film critics as an “alliance of shockers.”
K is completed by Tangerine Dream’s album Franz Kafka The Castle (2013) to be played on a loop in the Cisterna. This enclosed exhibition space will be transformed in an evocative and comfortable environment, where visitors can hang out and listen to the music by the German electronic music band founded by Edgar Froese in 1967.
As underlined by Udo Kittelmann, "America, The Trial, and The Castle form a ‘trilogy of loneliness,’ according to Kafka’s executor Max Brod. Seen in this light, we may also view Kas a triptych, an exhibition that resembles a tripartite, triple-layered picture. The structure is therefore similar to that of a traditional altarpiece, with America occupying the large central panel and The Trial and The Castle the side panels. The three parts can be read together as a remarkable allegory of the vicissitudes of life, or, in Kafka’s words: ‘All these parables really set out to say merely that the incomprehensible is incomprehensible, and we know that already.’"

**In light of our current situation, the 2nd edition of Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art (RIBOCA2), and suddenly it all blossoms, had to be reimagined. Initially planned to open on 16 May 2020 with a five-month duration, the project will now transform into a feature movie and the unfinished exhibition will become its film set, introduced through an online series of talks and conversations starting 21 May 2020.**
RIBOCA2: and suddenly it all blossoms, curated by Rebecca Lamarche-Vadel, grew out of the urge to change our way of inhabiting the world through reaching out to other voices, sensibilities, and ways of making relationships. As an alternative to the deluge of hopeless narratives, the notion of re-enchantment became a frame for building desirable presents and futures, where the end of "a" world does not mean "the end of the world". The present global circumstances resonate dramatically with the project and its urgent call for reinvention. Yet it has meant that the exhibition's original plan, composed of 85% new commissions, cannot be carried out as initially imagined, as parts of the world have abruptly paused and with them core transport and production infrastructures.
The Movie
As conventional ways of making, thinking and experiencing are being profoundly challenged, the need to reimagine exhibition formats and access seems more pressing than ever. Adapting to the great level of uncertainty in the coming months while maintaining its commitments to the artists, and suddenly it all blossoms will be transformed into a movie set, which will be open to the public for three weeks if conditions allow. The film itself will present a dialogue between finished, unfinished, and absent works. Somewhere between a ruin and a construction site, at the threshold of unknown tomorrows and open possibilities, and suddenly it all blossoms acknowledges our situation and the limits of our control.
Taking place in the Tarkovskian settings of Andrejsala, the former industrial port of Riga, the film follows the remnants of the original exhibition format and unfolds as an odyssey, a drift and a meditation that evolves between the works, surrounded by an ecosystem of granaries, empty lots, wastelands, an abandoned power station, a paintball field, hangars, bird colonies, a railway station and cruise ships, among others. Bearing the traces of yesterday’s industries while awaiting its potential rebirth, Andrejsala is a metaphor for the ruptures of modern utopias, Soviet ideals and capitalist hopes borne by Latvia’s tumultuous history. The film is equally a reflection on thresholds; of standing at the intersection of past and nascent worlds.
Visual Identity
The visual identity developed with the Studio Manuel Bürger equally echoes notions of transformation and movement, the renewal of visions and perspectives. Inspired by meteorological phenomena and their permanent becoming, the campaign will start from the motif of a cloud which will develop throughout time. Slowly evaporating as weeks pass, the cloud will morph while allowing images of the project to be revealed.
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**Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art 2020 (RIBOCA2)**
2nd edition
(16.05.2020 - 11.10.2020)
RIBOCA2 public opening: Saturday, May 16, 2020
Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art (RIBOCA), a major new biennial in Riga, Latvia, is pleased to announce the title and participants for its second edition. Entitled and suddenly it all blossoms, RIBOCA2 is curated by Rebecca Lamarche-Vadel and runs from May 16, 2020–October 11, 2020 in Riga, Latvia.
In a global context of ecological, economical and political upheavals, RIBOCA2 channels the notion of re-enchantment as both a frame for building the present and a mindset for developing desirable futures. Borrowing its title from the Latvian poet Māra Zālīte (b. 1952), the exhibition re-imagines ways of being human and explores other paths for making relationships. Offering alternatives to apocalyptic narratives, RIBOCA2 rails against cynicism and political despair, transforming fear into opportunity and peril into vitality.
The project draws its inspiration from the history of Riga, Latvia and the Baltic States, where “worlds have ended” many times since the 13th century, across a stream of occupations, wars and economic crises. In spite of these traumas, human and non-human solidarities have been maintained for centuries, through written and oral poetry, acknowledgements of celestial rhythms and practices of healing. The title of the show also links to the Latvian tradition of the dainas, a poetic form of resilience. These short poems, primarily created by women, deal with themes central to the Biennial such as earthly entanglements and interspecies bonds.
Reflecting on our collective inheritance and potential future harvests, RIBOCA2 aims to give attention and space to works celebrating the voices, gestures, rhythms and beings that have been silenced or that we might have not been unable to listen to. and suddenly it all blossoms proposes to recalibrate perspectives, for the possibility of a collective metamorphosis and a chance to build at the end of a world. Following the hypothesis that categories inherited from modernity might no longer be relevant, the exhibition supports the extension of the territory of art, inviting creators from fields located beyond art academies.
For its entire duration, the exhibition will be enriched by talks, workshops, events and performances imagined in collaboration with associate curator of public programme Sofia Lemos, and participation of poets, philosophers, historians, researchers, anthropologists and sociologists.
RIBOCA2 will comprise of a minimum of 85% new commissions, ethically produced in close relationship with local actors and communities. The Biennial brings together artists, creators and thinkers that mirror the enmeshment of local and global perspectives. Almost a third of the participating artists are from the Baltic countries, while almost 60% of the total are from the Baltic region (including Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Russia) in dialogue with individuals from Argentina, Austria, Belgium, Croatia, France, Greece, Italy, Mexico, Norway, Switzerland, the UK and the USA.
RIBOCA2 participants:
Pawel Althamer* / Kristaps Ancāns* / Alex Baczynski-Jenkins* / Nina Beier* / Oliver Beer / Hicham Berrada* / Dora Budor* / Eglė Budvytytė* / Valdis Celms* / Emanuele Coccia / CAConrad / Lorraine Daston / Edith Dekyndt* / Vinciane Despret / Erika Eiffel* / Vija Eniņa* / Miķelis Fišers* / Heinz Frank* / Monica Gagliano / Cyprien Gaillard* / Bendik Giske* / Honkasalo-Niemi-Virtanen* (Felicia Honkasalo, Akuliina Niemi, Sinna Virtanen) / Katrin Hornek* / Pierre Huyghe / Marguerite Humeau / IevaKrish* (Krišjānis Sants, Ieva Gaurilčikaitė) / Institute of the Cosmos: Anton Vidokle, Arseny Zhilyaev, Marina Simakova / Mikhail Karikis / Agnese Krivade* / Lina Lapelytė* / Hanne Lippard* / Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing / Mikhail Maksimov* / Mareunrol’s* (Mārīte Mastiņa-Pēterkopa, Rolands Pēterkops) / Berenice Olmedo* / Dominika Olszowy* / Sarah Ortmeyer* / Philippe Petit / Bridget Polk* / Paul B. Preciado / Tobias Rees / Ugo Rondinone / Jaanus Samma* / Tomás Saraceno*/ Boaventura de Sousa Santos / Ashley Hans Scheirl* / Augustas Serapinas* / Timur Si-Qin* / Nikolay Smirnov* / Anastasia Sosunova* / Daina Taimiņa*
*An asterisk denotes a new commission
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The Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art is pleased to announce the curatorial concept of RIBOCA2 by Rebecca Lamarche-Vadel.
Humanity is now at the crossroads and all signs call for a new epoch. Seeking an alternative to the deluge of hopeless narratives, the second edition of Riga Biennial of Contemporary Art (RIBOCA2), curated by Rebecca Lamarche-Vadel, looks to re-enchantment as a frame for building desirable futures, to reimagine ways of being human in a context of deep ecological, economical and social mutation. “The end of the world” has always haunted mankind. But while in previous tales, the apocalypse was provoked by some exterior phenomenon, an asteroid or plague befalling the Earth, current scientific reports attest that humans are solely responsible for the mass extinction to come.
How can we construct an inclusive society of entangled solidarities between beings? How to reconsider our culture when it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism? Which mythologies could replace the narratives of progress that dominated modernity? And can art offer alternative models for the way we inhabit the Earth?
The Biennial engages with our mental landscapes, encouraging poetic reinvention, asserting the potential for art to dialogue with the challenges and complexities of the world around us. The Earth, humans, non-humans, and matters are part of a vast interconnected network in which we can no longer play a central dominating role. Our constant exchanges with other presences, from micro to macro scales, confirm our hybrid, interdependent position within the bigger assembly of the living. The notion of collective re-enchantment means listening more carefully to these rhythms, looking more closely at other trajectories, being aware of longer timescales and the invisible architectures that animate the world. Against cynicism and political despair, transforming fear into possibility and peril into exuberance, the Biennial seeks alternative actions, thoughts, and narratives in the perspective of common futures. The Biennial finds inspiration from Riga, Latvia, and the Baltics, where “worlds have ended” many times in recent and distant history. Amidst occupations, wars, and economical flux, the region has undergone radical changes and rebirths. These conditions cultivated inspired practices of resilience, amongst them poetry, ritual and song, signs of a groundswell that culminated in the surreal human chain of two million citizens, a 600 km social sculpture, linking Tallinn to Riga to Vilnius in 1989. Riga and the Baltics have also been a zone of cultural entanglement for centuries, a bridge at the confluence of territories, where sensitivities and ideologies have been assembled and enmeshed since its very inception.
The Biennial will bring together 60 visionary international and regional artists and creators whose works challenge traditional definitions of art, expanding its usual territories by working and thinking beyond disciplines. Their researches question established conventions, becoming catalysts for alternative ways of looking, listening and feeling. Spreading across Riga’s parks, former industrial sites, wastelands, domestic houses, monuments, restaurants, hotels and harbors, the Biennial, following the principles of entanglement, embraces the pulses and rhythms of the transforming ecosystem of the city.
About the curator
Rebecca Lamarche-Vadel is a French curator and writer, and former curator at Palais de Tokyo (2012–19). Her internationally critically acclaimed projects include the solo exhibitions of Tomás Saraceno, Tino Sehgal, Marguerite Humeau, Ed Atkins, David Douard, Helen Marten, François Curlet and Jon Rafman.
About RIBOCA
The Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art (RIBOCA) is an international biennial with a European focus and a strong regional profile, founded in 2016. Taking the rich history of Riga and the Baltic states as its underlying framework, the biennial highlights the artistic landscape of the wider region and creates opportunities for artists to enter into dialogue with the cultural, historical and socio-political context of the city and its geographic surrounds.

Taus Makhacheva
4’224,92 cm2 de Degas
March 13–August 23, 2020
The Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne (MCBA), is pleased to announce Taus Makhacheva’s first solo exhibition in Switzerland, with a site-specific installation inspired by the museum’s collection history.
The works of Taus Makhacheva (born 1983, lives and works in Moscow), whether they take the form of performances, installations, or videos, are often inspired by a story—told, imagined, or experienced first-hand. She explores the grand narratives of history and the history of art, focusing on their constructions, omissions, and geographical and political slants. Take Tightrope (2015), a video installation presented at the 57th Venice Biennale, which shows a tightrope walker carrying copies of paintings from the Museum of Fine Arts named after P.S. Gamzatova in the artist’s native Dagestan across a rope stretched taut across a precipice, offering a metaphor both of the artist’s position and the hierarchies at work in the creation of artistic value.
For Lausanne, Taus Makhacheva has developed her considerations on our relationship to the past, to culture and to the fluctuating value of art, drawing on the MCBA collection. Her installation for the Project Space is the result of a lengthy process of research, during which she followed the move from the former museum site where the institution was housed since 1906, to its new premises which opened in 2019, and all the steps involved in restoring, packing, and transporting the art works. She also probed the history of the collection, taking an interest both in the grand narratives that underpin it and the anecdotes and individuals who built it up over the years, exploring the correspondence in the museum archive from the 1930s onwards and conducting interviews with members of staff. The artist offers visitors a stroll through an imaginary museum that fleshes out narratives rooted in reality but rendered as a fiction.
The exhibition title refers to the mysterious disappearance of 4,224,92 cm² from a pastel by Edgar Degas in the MCBA collection at some point between the inventory drawn up after his death and the work’s acquisition by the museum in 1936 (Blanchisseuses et chevaux, c. 1904). This enigmatic loss echoes Taus Makhacheva’s interest in processes of construction of artistic value, while also offering a clue that let her plan her exhibition like a plot and lay it out like a narrative across the installation space.
Taus Makhacheva’s installation is almost entirely made up of fabric, a medium that protects and envelops while at the same time holding the potential for uncovering. Gesturing both to painted canvas and to clothing, decor, and the tradition of soft sculpture, it can be read as a human-scale cross section model of an abandoned museum. Soft-picture rails that seem to have been put up at children’s height, hand-embroidered with stories both real and fictional of how artworks came to be in various museum collections, confetti on which details of paintings can be identified, and bolts of printed cloth on which the rough lines of the now missing parts of the Degas pastel can be made out, all lead to a large board, hung horizontally like an imaginary ceiling, with several openings that visitors are invited to poke their heads through to listen to a sound that simultaneously evokes water, fire, termites and various other pests. The visitors’ bodies are thus incorporated into the installation, playing an active listening role while temporarily becoming motionless, ephemeral statues as part of the installation. In another part of the space, stories about the value of art, about museum storage and that which is kept, collected and yet hidden, are broadcast by loudspeakers. Like the sculptural elements of the installation, the narratives populate the space and transform the relationship with time and with that which is known, imagined, witnessed, or felt.
The exhibition is a part of the free programme at the Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts’ Project Space, a 230 square meter space entirely dedicated to new commissions from both local and international contemporary artists.

David Blandy
How to Fly | How to Live
May 1–June 30, 2020
John Hansard Gallery, part of the University of Southampton, is pleased to announce two new digital works by artist David Blandy, especially commissioned to reflect on the uncertain times that we currently find ourselves in. These two new works show the audience How to Flyand How to Live, obliquely referencing our present moment, while also pointing to new potentials.
Through his diverse practice, David Blandy (b.1976, London, UK) questions our relationship to the culture that surrounds us, reflecting on the imaginary spaces that form our identity. Delving deep into video gaming, genre fantasy and Internet culture, he is fascinated by each form’s potential for communality and finding new forms of kinship.
The first of Blandy’s two new digital videos, How to Fly (2020) will be shown throughout May as an online exhibition to coincide with the soft launch of John Hansard Gallery’s new website, and will also be shown on e-flux Video & Film from May 1 through May 15. The second, How to Live (2020) will subsequently be shown online throughout June. These two newly commissioned works build on a series which uses the form of online video tutorials to explore ideas around patterns in nature and existence. Each of them begins with Blandy giving a step-by-step tutorial explaining how to make a short video about a specific subject, only using the tools available via a computer – through the Internet and video editing software to video games.
These two new tutorials develop from his previous works: How to make a short video about extinction (2014), and How to make a short video about ideas (2016). Both of these previous works explore the increasing uncertainty of what is real and what is artifice. As the digital world pervades and infiltrates every aspect of our lives, it becomes evermore difficult for anyone to ever have a ‘genuine’ sense of reality, instead these works highlight how reality is felt in a range of new and varying ways.
David Blandy is also one half of a collaborative practice with artist Larry Achiampong (whose recent exhibition at John Hansard Gallery, When the Sky Falls sadly had to close early due to the coronavirus pandemic). One of their recent projects, Finding Fanon (2015–17), focuses on the writing of Frantz Fanon and post-colonial identity, and their latest collaboration, entitled Genetic Automata (2019), was commissioned and toured by Arts Catalyst in 2019. This piece forms the first part of an ambitious new body of work by Blandy and Achiampong, exploring race and identity in an age of avatars, video games, and DNA ancestry testing. In 2018 their collaborative work was selected for the Film London Jarman Award.
David Blandy’s films are distributed through LUX and he is represented by Seventeen Gallery, London, UK. Blandy and Larry Achiampong are jointly represented by Copperfield Gallery and Seventeen Gallery, London, UK. Blandy’s work has been shown at numerous public institutions including Tate, London, UK; FACT, Liverpool, UK; BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK; INIVA, London, UK; Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, Germany; Spike Island, Bristol, UK; Turner Contemporary, Margate, UK; Nouveau Musée National de Monaco, Monaco; Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, Finland; Serpentine Gallery, London, UK; Witte de With, Rotterdam, Netherlands; Modern Art Oxford, UK; Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, Germany; Site Gallery, Sheffield, UK and Focal Point Gallery, Southend-on-Sea, UK.
How to Fly and How to Live are John Hansard Gallery online exhibitions as part of the Digital Array programme that is supported by the Barker-Mill Foundation.

Home from Home
Irish Artists respond to the COVID 19 restrictions
April 17–August 30, 2020
Artists: Sara Baume, Tinka Bechert, Martin Boyle, Brian Duggan, James L. Hayes, Kerry Guinan, Eileen Hutton, Julie Merriman, Doireann Ní Ghrioghair, Treasa O’Brien, Julia Pallone, Amanda Rice, Ciara Roche, Kathy Tynan, Mieke Vanmechelen
Curated by Chris Clarke and Fiona Kearney
The Glucksman is pleased to announce a new online initiative Home from Home intended as a way to provide insight into the extraordinary situation of being confined to home during the COVID-19 pandemic. The selected artists were due to present work in the Glucksman this April as part of the exhibition HOME: Being and belonging in contemporary Ireland which is now postponed until later this year.
Home from Home provides an artistic view of this unanticipated and unprecedented hiatus. Every Tuesday and Friday from April 17, the Glucksman shares an individual response on our website alongside additional information on the artist’s wider practice. As the weeks go by, the artists will collectively explore the shared challenges of being at home, the frustrations, boredom, anxiety, but also the capacity to reflect, create and connect.
The observations range in tone and media, from Ciara Roche’s painterly sketches of domestic space, to Mieke Vanmechelen’s creation of a rural environment turned upside down and Sara Baume’s homemade souvenirs in a world without tourist travel. Brian Duggan humorously records his own children’s cultural ingenuity while Julie Merriman focuses on repetitive cut-and-paste tasks as a means of keeping anxiety at bay. Home from Home began on Friday, April 17 with Eileen Hutton’s brief video clip of a bumblebee soundtracked by the sounds of her newborn son.
Home from Home captures some of the diverse ways we are all experiencing the current restrictions: the implications of working alongside children and pets, the solitary exploration of the imposed 2km parameter around one’s residence, the increased reliance on online networks and applications, a renewed attention to the natural world and the prominence of social distancing in our everyday lives.
Home from Home began on Friday, April 17, with new responses released every Tuesday and Friday throughout April, May and June 2020, and the cumulative works hosted and available for viewing online.

Mondrian and De Stijl
13.05.2020 - 14.09.2020
Holland at the beginning of the last century was the birthplace of a totally new form of art, an abstract art based on strict relations between rectangular forms, color planes, and straight lines. In October 1917, during the First World War, a group of young artists in neutral Holland joined forces to create a magazine. Called De Stijl, it presented and promoted this new, innovative art. The new art proved able to demolish the boundaries between disciplines, painting becoming architecture, applied arts becoming sculpture, design becoming art. Artists from all over the world adopted multidisciplinarity and worked together with intensity. It was refreshingly modern: they communicated via the magazine, letters, and mailings, just as artists today use modern forms of communication to reach one another.
Piet Mondrian was the founding father of the new art. A generation older than most of the others, he started in 1892 as an old-fashioned Dutch landscape painter, acquiring incredible skills over a period of almost twenty years. After 1905 he concluded that the quest for beauty—the ultimate objective of every painter—resides not in the subject or in the representational function of painting but in the way forms and colors produce a pictural plasticity that is perfectly able to speak directly to the eye of the beholder. For a while he presumed the source of beauty was hiding inside the painting. This at first led him to erratic ventures in theosophy, but by 1914 his experiments had brought him to the conclusion that beauty resides on the surface, in the structure and composition of color and line. He would need another three years to figure out exactly how it worked, but in 1918 the new abstract art was born. The new plasticity showed how painting could break free of the frame and influence and even determine the environment in which it is presented. The visual arts of the twentieth century were thus redefined as a new form of geometrical abstract art conquered the world and shaped modernity.
The show brings together examples of the work of Mondrian and his fellow artists. The accompanying catalog will shed new light on the way Mondrian looked for ways of presenting his work that would elucidate its meaning and allow onlookers to discover a clear, meaningful relationship both to it and, by extension, to the world that surrounds it. He was well aware that the works he chose for exhibitions could signal his intentions, could say something about his position relative to the work of his fellow artists. His selections also articulated the development in his own art. Mondrian continually broke down his own theories and principles, creating an ever freer, more dynamic, and lively art that still shapes the future.

Claudia Wieser. Generations
Curated by Rachel Adams
**EXTENDED THROUGH AUGUST 15, 2020
Opening date to be announced soon.**
**Claudia Wieser: Generations Virtual ARTalk**
Wednesday, April 15, 2020 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
Referencing the history of space and form through architecture, design, and imagery, Claudia Wieser considers the coexistence of abstraction and the physiological experience through her spatial installations. With a nod to Modernist geometric constructions inspired by the Bauhaus and influenced by spirituality within an artistic practice like artists Hilma af Klint, Wassily Kandinsky, and Paul Klee before her, Generations will encompass Wieser’s distinctive, multi-faceted practice. This will include hand-painted and patterned ceramics, carved wooden sculptures, tiled mirrored sculptures, fine colored pencil and gold leaf drawings, and large and small plinths that act as both sculptures for display and sculptures themselves. Wieser will create a new wallpaper for the exhibition undulating with imagery of historic sculpture and architecture, as well as imagery from both popular culture and the lesser-known avant-garde. Collaged together from her vast archive, the combination of textures, surfaces, and spliced imagery allows the viewer to create new histories, and in turn, see themselves both within that history and adding to it.
Wieser approaches art-making through combining geometric abstraction and found images, asking her viewers to look at ourselves looking, and what that means in the self-reflexive time in which we currently live. Through spending time with the work, Wieser’s interest in narrative emerges as she “attempts to find forms and arrangements which narrate more than concrete material and forms you can see.”1 The artist uses abstraction not only as a process tool but as a conceptual one as well. By stitching a constellation of elements together through kaleidoscopic forms, Wieser aims to change the visual interpretation of the viewer and give them a vastly new experience.
Claudia Wieser: Generations is co-curated by Rachel Adams, Bemis Chief Curator and Director of Programs and Jennifer Carty, Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Smart Museum of Art.
Claudia Wieser: Generations is organized by Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts and the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago.
Sponsored, in part, by Douglas County, Nebraska; The Goethe-Institut; Nebraska Arts Council and Nebraska Cultural Endowment; Omaha Steaks; and Streck.
Claudia Wieser: Generations is on view at the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago September 22–December 13, 2020.

Eileen Gray—on view at the Bard Graduate Center Gallery, located at 18 West 86th Street in New York City, from February 29 through July 12, 2020—is the first in-depth exhibition in the United States to examine the total oeuvre of designer and architect Eileen Gray (1878-1976). The exhibition, curated by Cloé Pitiot, is comprised of approximately 200 works, including never before publicly exhibited furniture, lacquer works, architectural drawings, and archival materials. The exhibition offers new insights about Gray’s long and distinguished career that began in the early 1900s and continued until her death in 1976, with particular attention to her practice as an architect. Rarely seen architectural drawings and photographs elucidate how Gray designed her most famous house, E 1027, and other architectural projects.
Eileen Gray is organized in five thematic sections that consider critical stages of Gray’s career. It begins with her early training as a painter in London at the dawn of the twentieth century, alongside contemporaries such as Wyndham Lewis, and her arrival in France in 1902, where she would spend the rest of her life. It follows her early experiments in lacquer and weaving, and the establishment of Galerie Jean Désert in Paris. Special emphasis is given to to Gray's architectural projects from private houses for leisure to proposals for public facilities. Throughout the exhibition, Gray’s seminal works are presented alongside a rich trove of photographic and archival documents, some never before shown in public.
The exhibition is accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue designed by Irma Boom and distributed by Yale University Press.

Sigmar Polke "ZEITREISE"
Photographs 1966 – 1986 | Collection Georg Polke
06.03.2020 – 30.05.2020
Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin: Goethestraße 2/3
Galerie Max Hetzler is pleased to announce the solo exhibition "ZEITREISE" – Photographs 1966 – 1986. Collection Georg Polke with photographs by Sigmar Polke from the Collection Georg Polke at Goethestraße 2/3.
In his early photographs, Sigmar Polke proves to be an experimental quick-change artist and alchemist in the darkroom. Most of the photographs have only recently been revealed, characterising Sigmar Polke as a protagonist of the art world and perceptive chronicler with a unique sense of humour. The broad set of photographs points to a life of constant companionship with the camera, and takes its viewer on a journey back in time to the late 60s and 70s up until Polke's participation in the 1986 Biennale.
In numerous photographs Polke depicts his immediate surroundings: in his home, at first in Düsseldorf, from 1972 onwards at the Gaspelshof in Willich, later on in Cologne, and also of visits to vernissages and of travels. This creates “incredible documents of being present” (Bice Curiger), which bear witness to the photographer's zest for life and compassion, his alertness and presence. Life and art merge into one another in his images, whereby the Rhenish art scene of the 1970s always tended to stage itself in front of the lens.
Polke defies rules in an extremely carefree way in his photography, constantly searching for ways to escape the triviality of everyday life. By processing his photographs with various technical and photochemical interventions, Polke explores the limits of the medium, leaving the sentiment of photography as a mere form of documentation far behind. He purposely blurs and disrespects exposure time, solarises, erases certain parts of the image and plays with double exposure. Spontaneously manipulating and superposing negatives, on occasion under the influence of hallucinatory substances, contributes to giving his work a particular mystical glow. Through the processing, the motifs become ambiguous and ambivalent, at the same time they are alienated by a surreal picture language and undergo a superelevation, whereby Polke's photography significantly gains characteristics of his paintings.
“Polke uses deliberately produced 'mistakes' and random effects as a kind of catalyst. By doing so he creates humorous images that break from everyday life and endow a mysterious aura to the trivial.” (Dr. Fritz Emslander, Stellvertretender Direktor, Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen, 2018)
Some of the photographs in the Georg Polke Collection derive from the photographic laboratory at the Gaspelshof in Willich, which Sigmar Polke partly left to his son Georg in 1978, while another part was given to Georg Polke by his father in 1986.
For many years the photographs remained fairly unknown and first came into the public eye in 2018 in the exhibition Sigmar Polke. Fotografien 70-80 at the Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen, and were presented the following year in the exhibition Sigmar Polke's Photographic Infamies at LE BAL, Paris.
The exhibition is complemented by a large-scale vitrine showcasing almost all monographic publications by and about Sigmar Polke. The vast collection (Prigge Collection, Eifel) spans all exhibition catalogues and publishing house publications as well as the majority of distributed invitation cards, leaflets and other ephemera. Apart from this it comprises rare catalogue editions, catalogues with original drawings by Polke and limited edition artist books. The bibliophile collector Thomas Prigge has been following Polke's exhibitions and publications intensively since the late 1960s and assured that he "always kept everything".
Prigge's large archive cabinet contains the entire Polke collection published to date, spanning from Polke's first publication on the occasion of his first solo exhibition at the Galerie Rene Block (Berlin, 1966) to the most recent exhibition catalogues. Over many years the passionate collector rounded off his archive with true rarities – including for example the typescript of Polke's self-interview in 1966, the artist booklet on the occasion of the legendary exhibition Fünf in Köln (Kölnischer Kunstverein, 1979), published in only a few photocopies, as well as unique works, such as Polke's collaged comic Diabolik (1979) and his randomly executed klecksographs ohne Titel (Stenogramme) in a binder from 1985. The numerous publications on Sigmar Polke's photographic oeuvre are presented in display cases.
Sigmar Polke (1941 - 2010), lived and worked in Düsseldorf, Cologne and Hamburg. Polke's work was part of solo and group exhibitions in renown institutions, such as Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Siegen (2018); Museum Frieder Burda, Baden-Baden (2017); Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main (2016); Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach (2015); Tate Modern, London; The Museum of Modern Art, New York (both 2014); Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand, São Paulo (2011); Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg (2009); Städtische Galerie, Karlsruhe (2008); J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles (2007); The National Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan (2006); Ueno Royal Museum, Tokyo (2005) and Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas (2002), among others. His works are in the collections of the Centre Georges Pompidou – Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris; Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Bilbao; The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The National Museum of Art, Osaka; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam and Tate Modern, London, among others.